Sunday, June 29, 2014

It was remarkably appropriate that Clint
Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima
should open here in the same week that George W. Bush announced an additional
21,000 troops headed for Iraq. Bush may have had unwavering supporters for this
move somewhere, but they were hard to find. Most Democrats, and many
Republicans, thought the focus should be on winding down and pulling out. The
dwindling band of hawks, in a grim application of the in for a penny in for a
pound philosophy, mostly thought that any increase should be greater (Frank
Rich pointed out that the total American military commitment, post increase,
remained less than the manpower of the NYPD).

Letters from Iwo Jima

No one, of course, knows. These
calibrations couldn’t be more spurious; Bush’s sense of the specific demands of
the Baghdad insurgency, despite everything we hear about briefings and meetings
and deliberations, never seems more than impressionistic, if not fantastic. But
maybe it was always so. You look at our world in 2007 through one eye and it’s
a temple of achievement – the gleaming payoff for centuries of slow progress.
Then you look through the other eye and it’s the same primitive, ill-considered
mess it’s always been. The main mark of our progress – one that’s destined by
its nature to be short-lived – is perhaps merely the ability to keep these two
dueling realities so clinically hidden from each other.

Eastwood’s other film from last year, Flags of our Fathers, focused on the
creation of military heroes, dramatizing the vast ideological machine and its
disregard for truth or the individual well being of the individuals who feed
the beast. The film fell a little flat with most people, but watching the much
starker, pained Letters from Iwo Jima,
it hit me more clearly how Flags –
for all its apparent respect toward American heartland values – exposes the
machinations of a puffed-up, corrupt empire. The glory of dying for one’s
country generally seems a function of rarity and positioning more than of
inherent “achievement” or “meaning” – look at the news coverage of each
Canadian military death in Afghanistan – which limits the impact of stories
told from the perspective of the winners.

As if dissatisfied by the scope of Flags, Eastwood decided during its
production to make this companion film about the other side. It’s certainly one
of the bleakest examples of an increasingly bleak genre. Iwo Jima was a
wretched island, considered strategically important in the final phase of WW2
for its position 650 miles from Tokyo. Facing a certain American invasion, the
unraveling Japanese empire deployed some 21,000 men (now that number sounds
familiar somehow…) to the island, with little or no air and sea support. The
Americans sent in 110,000 marines in 880 ships. At the end of 36 days, one in
three of the Americans were killed or wounded, but virtually all the Japanese
perished. This, it seems, was essentially preordained – the Japanese strategy
called for no survivors, asking of their soldiers only to maximize the
slaughter of American troops before dying themselves. Letters from Iwo Jima focuses on the Japanese commander,
Kuribayashi, on his deputies, and on some of the ordinary men, and I don’t
think I’m giving too much away when I say only one of these survives. The film is
not about fighting, but about dying.

Honour and Accountability

Certainly it has its fill of stirring
incident and spectacle, and moments of human identification. Eastwood’s
approach here is more linear than in the sprawling Flags, but still accommodates occasional flashbacks to previous
lives, and voice-overs reading from the letters of the title. Narratively, the
film is accessible enough. But it’s deliberately taxing and draining. The
colours are utterly desaturated, rendering most frames a grim yellowish gray,
with only the occasional grimy infusion of blood to vary the scheme. The
Japanese spend much of their time staking out the enemy in tunnels, which
creates an immense claustrophobic weight. Initially, Kuribayashi has the
buoyancy of the true believer, and the film allows this to shape its momentum
for a while, but the hopelessness of the mission soon becomes clear, the
commander can do no more than agonize in his bunker about the collapse of all
around him, and the film becomes increasingly fragmented, along with what it
portrays.

The film has its weaknesses. I was
surprised afterwards to read the Japanese had even as many as 21,000 men,
because the film seems to suggest it was much less, thus facilitating the sense
of hopelessness, and allowing contrivances such as repeated meetings between
the commander and the film’s main everyman character. But it’s a film of great
eloquence and weight. As things go on, suicide comes increasingly to dominate
its scheme (more than any war film I can remember), further deepening its
reverie on death, on what’s a good death in wartime, on the nature of duty to
country and empire. Which, reflecting the rigid Japanese culture of honour and
accountability, provides another obvious parallel with the feckless oversight
of the Iraq endeavour.

Flags
of our Fathers ended on a memory of camaraderie
among the American soldiers, playing around in the sea. Letters of Iwo Jima closes on the dark, accusatory silhouette of
the wretched island. Those two images, on their face, merely embody the
spectrum between winning and losing, but the two films together, along with the
good fortune of their timing (although a filmmaker as fast moving and canny as
Eastwood can truly be said to make his own luck) establish the corrupt arrogance
of those very concepts in war. They’re a powerful collective letter indeed.

Alpha Dog

Meanwhile, in the most privileged enclaves
of modern day America, cinematic evidence accumulates that the life of the
average young adult is merely a dissipated whirl of drugs and violence and
casual sex and random connection. No wonder George W. Bush doesn’t want to
bring back the draft! Nick Cassavetes’ Alpha
Dog is based on the story of real-life California drug dealer Jesse James
Hollywood, who in 2000 was at the middle of a spontaneous kidnapping that went
horribly astray. Emile Hirsch plays the fictionalized Johnny Truelove, and the
film’s best performance, truly, comes from Justin Timberlake as the sweetest
natured, most tragically misled of his posse.

It’s a very full film in the sense that
it’s stuffed with secondary characters and connections – the many young women
who hang ingratiatingly around the swaggering dudes seem especially anonymous
and interchangeable – and it’s absolutely never boring. But this territory has
been covered so many times that one can tick off the thematic threads before
the lights even go down:stunted
maturity; ineffectual parenting; lax morality; too much easy money; latent
homoeroticism; parakeet fetishism. Well, I made that last one up. I have no
idea how many people out there are living the Alpha Dog life, but I think the subculture has been adequately
charted by now. Ain’t freedom wonderful though?

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Jack Lemmon is one of my favourite actors of all time. I know this is true,
because I regularly rewatch movies I wouldn’t think of spending time on
otherwise, solely because Jack Lemmon is in them, and there’s hardly anyone
else I can say that for. A few months ago, I even watched Airport ’77 for Pete’s sake – that’s the one in which a failed
hijack attempt sends the plane underneath the ocean. Lemmon plays the pilot,
and it’s really not a role conducive to any kind of meaningful acting – the
last third of the film plays mostly like an information film regarding the
might of the US Navy – but his presence normalizes the melodrama at least a
little. In the last few years I’ve also watched largely forgotten Lemmon films
like The April Fools and Under the Yum Yum Tree, as well as many
of the ones he’s actually remembered for.

Save the Tiger

Lemmon’s persona mixes intelligence, sincerity and anxiety, in a ratio that
shifts from role to role; his characters are often swept along by a mixture of
external mishaps and internal inadequacy, hopelessly pushing back against
overwhelming circumstance, usually papered over by a veneer of jokiness or
fast-talking. In the sixties, this made him the perfect embodiment of the young
guy on the make, showing time and again how the
business suit barely stays on for all the tics and pressures and excess booze;
as he aged, accordingly, the
suits may have got finer, but the man within them was more likely to crumble.
He won his best actor Oscar in 1973 for Save
the Tiger, where he plays Harry Stoner, owner of a faltering garment
manufacturer who eventually resorts to arson to keep the business going. The
film is a writerly artificiality, cramming years of escalating frustration into
one day, stuffed with portents of loss and disaster (the plight of the
endangered tiger being just one), but Lemmon is entirely fascinating, conveying
both the agony and the perverse near-exhilaration of Harry’s looming personal
and professional crack-up.

When he won the award, Lemmon beat out Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, Al Pacino in Serpico and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, which must have
seemed like the triumph of the establishment over the new wave (even if his
film career was younger thanBrando’s).
He won the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award at the age of 63,
the second youngest winner at that point (Orson Welles had received it at 59), getting
it ahead of people like Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck who had a big head start
on him. In other words, he rapidly became an institution, but one seemingly
based as much on personal decency and affability as on the nature of his screen
presence. It’s a little hard, even for Lemmon fans, to articulate exactly what
it is that you’re responding to in his work.

Mannered regret?

David Thomson, not a particular Lemmon fan, wrote in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that the
actor is “hugely skilled, meticulous, and yet- it seems to me – an abject,
ingratiating parody of himself. Long ago, worry set in, the detail of his work
turned fussy, nagging, and anal; his mannerisms are now like a miser’s coins…I
can’t bear to see or hear that mannered regret any more.” Although I obviously
don’t feel that way, I agree with Thomson in one respect: whereas most of
Hollywood’s great stars never gave “bad” performances when cast in their
comfort zones, Lemmon was fairly often over-indulged, becoming repetitive and
even annoying. Blake Edwards directed him to one of his most raw, affecting
performances in Days of Wine and Roses,
but thereafter abused the actor’s faith in him. In The Great Race, Lemmon plays a comic villain, so broadly and
monotonously that the film starts seeming as long as the race; later in the
movie, he also plays a European crown prince who’s the villain’s double, and
although the intention there is to convey idiocy rather than evil, the
character behaves more or less the same, and just as annoyingly.

Even worse, twenty years later, Edwards cast Lemmon in That’s Life, which should have been a crowning achievement for both
men: Edwards was coming off his most mature and strangely complex period (“10,” S.O.B.) and Lemmon had recently
collected three more Oscar nominations (The
China Syndrome, Tribute, Missing). But the movie ended up chronically
self-absorbed and whiny, and at the same time off-puttingly opulent and smug,
seeming like the sad product of too much time inside a self-indulgent bubble.
The fault is no doubt Edwards’ more than Lemmon’s, but one feels an actor of
his stature should have been able to push back more effectively against the
complacency engulfing him (the film of Glengarry
Glen Ross makes better, if still conventional, use of late Lemmon).

Lemmon’s vulnerability

If I also add that I’ve never much cared for Lemmon’s revered performance
in Some Like it Hot either (writing
about the film here a few years ago I said “his
‘Daphne’ is a gargoyle, tittering and screeching; to say the least, it’s an
unsophisticated approach to the character”), it might raise the question of why
I seem to be dwelling on his weaknesses as much as on his strengths. I think
it’s because Lemmon’s magnificence, his uniqueness in American cinema, isn’t
despite but is in large part because of
his limitations and excesses – if his technique and control often falters, it’s
a guarantee of his vulnerability, and therefore of his remarkable resonance in
conveying the weight of modern problems. His trademark delivery style, which
feels like he’s adding 50% of nervous digression to whatever was written on the
page, seems to convey a deep-rooted fear of falling, all the more compelling
for knowing that he sometimes did.

In several of his
seventies films, Lemmon appears fully naked (from the back), and there’s
nothing at all aspirational about what he shows – unexceptional musculature,
thin arms, body hair and tan lines that just come as they come. Far from the
general notion of Hollywood stars as physical and cultural ideals, Lemmon shows
himself as a man who’ll have to get by on his wits, if at all, and who severely
doubts how long that can last. It’s no surprise that his roles became less
interesting in the 80’s, as pumped-up Reagan-era optimism became the dominant
order of the day (Lemmon himself was a committed Democrat).

His great friend
and co-star Walter Matthau was much less inclined to let his doubts show, more
of the caustic gambler who figures he can bulldoze his way through anything.
Their best film together is probably their first, The Fortune Cookie, where Lemmon’s pliable character gets
manipulated this way and that by Matthau’s Whiplash Willie. Their old man buddy
movies are just going through the motions, but even by their existence, they
testified that despite the worries and stresses, Lemmon’s particular brand of
everyman had somehow hung on.

Steven Spielberg’s Munich takes off from the massacre of Israeli athletes by
Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics, following five covert Israeli
operatives, on a mission authorized by Golda Meir, to track down and
assassinate eleven men identified as responsible. Eric Bana is the leader of
the group and Geoffrey Rush is his field officer. The film feels designed to be
important. That’s partly a result of its making – shot in relative secrecy and
then released for Oscar season with minimal media stroking by Spielberg or his
cast (except for an exclusive Time
cover that seems to have alienated much of the rest of the press corps), as
though the film – like its protagonists – were expected to achieve preeminence
through inherent smarts and moral entitlement. As it is, it aroused pockets of
strong support – Slate’s David
Edelstein for one counts it as 2005’s best picture – but a more general apathy,
and some considerable antipathy.

Idea of Evenhandedness

I think that’s an understandable reaction
overall. It’s a long movie – some 160 minutes – although I was generally
engaged by it. But this engagement primarily took place on the level of a
familiar and at times somewhat mechanical thriller. The movie quickly settles
into a groove whereby each target is tracked down in turn via a mysterious
French middleman possessing omnipotent information but professing no moral or
political affiliation (except the very act of disclaiming all governmental
allegiance), each set-up involves some new kind of explosive device or other
quirk, and each entails some hiccup on the way to completion. Spielberg’s
execution of all this is generally impeccable, but there’s nothing at all
remarkable about any of it – it’s like a retread of however many John Le
Carre-type adaptations.

This would all be fine, if it were merely
the genre skeleton on which Spielberg imposed something thematically bracing.
But it’s in this area that Munich
proves most keenly disappointing, and disappointing in exactly the way that one
has sadly come to expect from him. The film simply displays little intellectual
heft or political courage; to take only the most recent example, it seems thin
and undernourished compared with Syriana,
which displays less grasp of classical filmmaking, but is nevertheless far more
compelling by virtue of its willingness to pick a thesis and stick to it,
balance be damned. Munich is merely
frustrating, and constantly causes you to wonder why Spielberg took on the
subject in the first place.

A few samples of the commentary will get
this point across better than I can. This is Leon Wieseltier from The New Republic. “The real surprise of Munich is how tedious it is. ... It is
soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians murder,
Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show
evidence of a conscience…All these analogies begin to look ominously like the
sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents
was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective. No doubt Munich will be admired for its
mechanical symmetries, which will be called complexity. But this is not
complexity, it is strategy. I mean of the marketing kind. … Munich is desperate not to be charged
with a point of view. It is animated by a sense of tragedy and a dream of
peace, which all good people share, but which in Hollywood is regarded as a
dissent, and also as a point of view.”

Compromise and Dialogue

Here’s a more explicitly ideological
expression of the same general reservation, from David Brooks in The New York Times.“By choosing a story set in 1972, Spielberg
allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East,
Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg's Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic
Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the
current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.

“There is, above all, no evil. And that is
the core of Spielberg's fable. In his depiction of reality there are no people
so committed to a murderous ideology that they are impervious to the sort of
compromise and dialogue Spielberg puts such great faith in.”

There’s much other available commentary
along the same lines. And the basic point seems to me incontrovertible.
Spielberg doesn’t help his case in a recent interview with Roger Ebert, where
he seems to have little specific to say about his film’s thesis, but goes on
vaguely about “larger meaning” and how “the dialogue needs to be louder than
the weapons” and how discussion “is the highest good – it’s Talmudic.” Munich is duly filled with seemingly
endless exchanges and meditations on how one act of vengeance may merely
precipitate another. I cannot assess the claims for historical accuracy, but
with a truly probing director that wouldn’t matter. Co-writer Tony Kushner
wrote Angels in America, which
generated great meaning and resonance, partly out of real people, without
holding itself hostage to mundane pro- or con- accounting based on the mundane
facts.

One of several weird paradoxes of
Spielberg’s career is that he’s a master at creating fantasy worlds, bringing
about our complete immersion in essentially outlandish premises, but then turns
poky and pious in his “serious” projects. Munich
ends with a shot of the World Trade Center, some twenty five years before 9/11,
as a backdrop to the final conversation between Bana and Rush. The allusion is
obvious, that what we’ve witnessed is in some way a foundation for the cycle of
hatred and excess that culminated in that grave attack, and from there into the
war in Iraq and God knows what lies beyond. But as insights go, this is not one
iota more articulate or rational than George W. Bush’s aspirations for
democracy in the Middle East.

Threat from within

Spielberg’s other 2005 movie, War of the Worlds, was inherently much
easier to take, prompting some to wonder why at this late stage he spends his
time on such material, and yet I actually found the film more politically
provocative than Munich. That film
also has 9/11 references in abundance, some of which might be considered merely
opportunistic, but I thought the central metaphor of the overwhelming threat
emerging from within, into the midst of a carefully evoked blue collar milieu,
was a more intriguing commentary on middle-American complacency and
vulnerability than anything in Munich.
That film was justly criticized for its soft family-centric ending, and Munich again proves itself vulnerable on
this score, as political calculations yield to the imperative of simply
protecting one’s own.

The film does hint at some intriguing
angles on the interplay of personal and political, through a recurring
preoccupation with lost fathers, but this comes to seem more like a
Spielbergian indulgence than a substantial contribution to the “larger
meaning.” I don't want to overstate the case – Munich is full of intriguing sequences, and Spielberg’s calculating
grimness is hardly more negligible than the achievements of many other serious
films. But even as he explains it, his film’s lessons appear targeted mainly at
unthinking zealots, and I don’t think I’m paying either myself or you the
reader an unwarranted compliment when I say we may be a little beyond that.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

I’ve written in this space before about the great director
John Cassavetes, but that was in 2005, so it wouldn’t seem like a sign of
obsession to write about him again (you can find the previous article here).
I recently rewatched his 1974 film A
Woman under the Influence, for the first time in seven years, and it was as
magnificent and overwhelming an experience as ever. There are plenty of
directors whose work doesn’t feel like anyone else’s, but it often feels as if
you make your way into their films by trekking down a very specific and often
very long corridor, leaving behind the rooms and the furnishings you usually
hang out among, just hoping the journey will be worth it and that the carpet
isn’t toxic. Cassavetes, in comparison, seems to be waiting at the entrance to
the corridor when you arrive, pulling you along, gabbing in your ear, stamping
you with his infectious enthusiasm, and yet also being an almost instant pain
in the ass, so that you can’t help thinking you might turn and run from him, if
not that he’d catch you up and probably knock you down.

John
Cassavetes

In that previous article, which I wrote not long after the
release of the Criterion boxed set John
Cassavetes: Five Films (still one of the most crucial items on my DVD
shelves), I emphasized such matters as Cassavetes’ delight in behavior, in
performance, in love as the driving force of human nature. It’s sometimes
occurred to me that Cassavetes (who died in 1989) would likely have regarded my
own largely peaceful, conflict-free relationship as a soulless surrender, a
shutting-down of something elemental. Although I’m quite certain I wouldn’t be
happy living my life in Cassavetes fashion, his view of the world, as you’re
watching his films, is so persuasive that it’s hard to entirely bat the
question away.

My own favourite is his late film Love Streams (not in the Criterion set, but apparently coming soon),
but A Woman under the Influence (which
is in the set) was his greatest
success, at least as measured by popular interest and Oscar nominations; it was
a key contribution to a time when debates about women’s equality and liberation
were active and heated. It’s a portrait of Mabel Longhetti (played by Gena
Rowlands, Cassavetes’ wife), who maintains a household and brings up three kids
while her husband Nick (Peter Falk) works long hours in a blue-collar job. From
the start of the film, it’s unclear whether Mabel is by some definition
mentally ill, or just extremely quirky, and of course there’s no clear point
where one merges into the other. Either way, her behavior becomes disruptive
enough that the family sends her to a hospital for six months, but when she
returns it’s unclear how much has actually changed (which thus reinforces the
question of whether she was ever under the influence of anything that could be
treated, other than perhaps life itself).

Essential
impossibility

Writing a few years afterwards, James Monaco said: “it’s by
far the best portrait we have of the essential impossibility of the housewife’s
role, and it’s a logically harrowing narrative of the painful neurosis that is
so often the only response to that dilemma.” The film wasn’t in any sense a
feminist fantasy though: Monaco also cited Susan Schenker’s assessment that
Cassavetes “has purposefully designed the film without giving Mabel the
slightest chance to explain herself. She has no girlfriend, no sympathetic
listener to talk to, and so the deck is neatly stacked against her.” Even this
well-intentioned critique seems at heart though to be reaching a conclusion
about Mabel’s condition, that it’s of a kind that could only benefit from
sympathetic listening (which, written in the context of the 70’s, seems to
herald a lifetime of analysis) and so must in some way need to be talked away.
But this might merely be a twist on the age-old labeling of female expression
as “hysteria,” or worse.

The film’s key scene, I think, comes shortly after Mabel
arrives home, far more subdued at first than we’ve seen her before. Almost
before she’s had any chance to settle, Nick drags her aside, and more or less
pummels her back toward her old behavior, telling her “there’s nothing you can
do wrong,” and “I just want you to be yourself,” and forcing her to drag up
some of the weird sounds she used to make. It’s a deeply ambiguous moment. In
some sense, it seems Nick realizes Mabel will never reach a workable
equilibrium in this anaesthetized state, and for her own good pushes her toward
fuller self-expression. But it’s also clear that for the most part, he likes
her the way she is, and throughout the film he behaves in a way that seems
calculated (knowingly or intuitively) to spark confrontations and outbursts,
both with Mabel and with others. Perhaps he’s partly a liberating force, but he
also insists oppressively on setting the terms of Mabel’s rehabilitation.

Everyday
madness

But with the passage of time, it’s easier to see too how you
might as well refer to the essential impossibility of Nick’s role – an ordinary
if somewhat volatile man, eternally pushed and constrained by conflicting
influences (in one of the extras on the disk, Rowlands and Falk recall how
audiences booed his character, but that seems unlikely to happen now). The film
ends on an extended scene of togetherness and marital syncopation, but it’s
clear nothing has been resolved – the following day, Nick will go to work
again, and the kids will go to school, and Mabel will have the same overwhelming
question: how to make sense of her hours and days and years, to make them fully
her own, while maintaining a functional interaction with the rest of the world.

Thirty years after it came out, the film seems startlingly
radical and mysterious. Monaco’s comments about the essential impossibility of
the housewife’s role, and Schenker’s about Mabel’s lack of opportunity to
explain herself, would have to mean something very different in a world of
revved-up distraction and connectivity, and the fact that there seems to be no
chance of her looking for a job would surely have to be remarked on now. In
some ways, we’re in an age that purports to prize personal expression (in
matters of honesty about sexuality for instance), but in others – for example
in the way we’re all meant to be consumed by electronic trivia and disposable
media-fueled daily outrages – everything pushes us toward uniformity.
Cassavetes might well have diagnosed such insularity as a form of collective
madness, a systematic rejection of possibility, far more toxic to the soul than
Mabel’s swooping into odd utterances and gestures and outbursts of wacky
creativity and honesty.

Friday, June 13, 2014

This was a satisfying year – the first in a
while where I find myself puzzling over what to leave off the top ten list
rather than over what to put on it. Here’s where I ended up (in no particular
order); apologies to any masterpieces released at the very end of the year.

Before Sunset

There’s something
almost unbearably touching and joyous about Richard Linklater’s sequel to his
1995 Before Sunrise. The film’s
concept (two people having an extended conversation in Paris) and execution are
simple, but its impact seems to flow from the very heart of cinema, prompting
endless reflections on memory and the power of the image. Ethan Hawke and Julie
Delpy are both magnificent, and it probably has the best ending of the year.

Uzak (Distant)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish film had a
brief run at the Cinematheque, where it evoked for me the transforming effect
of watching Chantal Akerman’s Les
rendezvous d’Anna at the age of 16 or 17; about an unemployed man who comes
from the country to the city to stay with his more prosperous cousin, it’s
visually ravishing and totally gripping from the outset as a thematic and
psychological construction. The film’s beautiful choreography gracefully
depicts the similarities in the two men’s solitary trajectories; it’s one of
the best recent films on the classic arthouse theme of alienation.

Dogville

I wouldn’t strenuously disagree with the
common list of faults identified in Lars von Trier’s Dogville: pretentiousness, repetition, lazy point scoring. Even so,
this film about a woman’s humiliation in a small Depression-era village is
stylistically so fascinating (it was shot in its entirety inside a Swedish
warehouse, with no sets) that a reasonably minded viewer should be able to stay
with it through these challenges. And it’s clearly a major piece of political
cinema, even if one’s assessment in that regard is inevitably going to be
coloured by personal preconceptions.

Cremaster 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Matthew Barney’s already semi-legendary Cremaster cycle, made over the last ten
years, finally arrived at the Cinematheque, then at the Carlton. Overall it’s
an amazing achievement by Barney. The films are as consciously “arty’ as
anything you’ll ever see – their perversity and incredible individuality serve
as a constant challenge to all preconceptions, but despite that they achieve a
remarkable degree of coherence. With the director himself turning up in a
variety of weird guises, the series is certainly narcissistic, but Barney’s
multi-dimensional mirror seems at times to reflect almost the entire span of
creative endeavour, and it’s thrilling both to watch and to contemplate
afterwards.

Vera Drake

Leigh’s amazing film shows an ordinary
woman in 1920’s England who “helps out girls in trouble” – she performs
abortions, and eventually is arrested and put through the justice system.The film is a devastating sociological
critique, based in an almost supernatural evocation of time and place – in
particular, each character represents a slightly different perspective on
sexuality, shown here as a commodity inherently conditioned by class. The film
is less showy than some of Leigh’s work, but ultimately I think it ranks second
only to Topsy-Turvy.

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s
documentary on the making of Metallica’s last album delivers all the rock genre
goods, but with a bizarre (until you’ve thought of it, that is) contemporary
twist: the band members undergo relentless talk therapy as they try to hold it
all together. It’s intermittently hilarious and always fascinating, and in a
year of many fine documentaries stands out in the memory for its surprising
thematic scope.

Demonlover

Olivier Assayas’ 2002 film finally played
here at the Cinematheque after a long delay. It’s an amazing creation,
straining what you’d think would be the edges of someone’s creative prowess.
The first half is a precise, superbly executed drama of high finance (perhaps
the best since Alan Pakula’s Rollover);
the second half deliberately sheds all coherence, taking on the dream logic of
a David Lynch film as alliances and understandings persistently redefine
themselves. The film exhibits a cacophony of interests and influences, all
spinning off the cultural, personal and sexual perils of high-tech
globalization, opening up unimaginable wells of neurosis.

The Dreamers

When I saw Bernardo Bertolucci’s chronicle
of sex and cinema in 1968 Paris, it didn’t seem likely to make this list.
Certain parts of the film are utterly vibrant and compelling, but the emphasis
on so much youthful beauty rather blurs its thematic possibilities, and the
ending seemed far more visually arresting than meaningful. Even so, I find
myself dwelling on the film far more than most others, perhaps because in
making a film that draws so explicitly on his own origins, Bertolucci almost
seems to be acknowledging his need for rejuvenation.

Son Frere

On the basis of my sole visit there so far,
Atom Egoyan’s Camera (on 1020 Queen West) is an enticing addition to the city,
especially since you can see a film there, walk a couple of blocks and then
hang out at the Drake Hotel. It’s where I saw Patrice Chereau’s Son Frere, a hugely accomplished study
of a man with a debilitating blood disease and his relationship with his
brother. The film blends clinical precision of observation with an
extraordinarily fluid perspective toward family versus sexual love, and the
social implications of illness and its inherently marginalizing consequences;
it’s emotionally wrenching, and thrilling in its thoroughness.

Million Dollar Baby

After the astonishing one-two punch of Mystic River and the new film, Clint
Eastwood again seems close to the summit of American directors. The film shows
no shame with boxing cliches; the characters are essentially stock figures, and
much of the trajectory is familiar. But Million
Dollar Baby seems to understand these mechanics more fully and fluently
than almost any other film – it’s an eloquent study, minimally but beautifully
styled, in how the sport’s strange mechanics and culture redefine the three
main characters.

Other honourable mentions: The Triplets of Belleville, Broken Wings,
Baadaaaas, The Mother, Zatoichi. That’s a lot of honourable mentions – it
was a good year. As I mentioned, lots of good (or at least intriguing)
documentaries too – My Architect, The
Take, The Yes Men, The Corporation. Films like Sideways and Kinsey were
terrific entertainments without quite convincing me as art. As always, I doubt
that I saw the year’s worst films, but I was heavily in the dissenting camp on The Passion of Christ, and was lukewarm
on Fahrenheit 911. Also a great film festival year, lots of great
DVD releases, and another wonderful year at the Cinematheque. Could I be
happier? Sure, if they released Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind. See you in 2005!

The story behind Shark
seems to be something like this: after a fifteen year run of getting financing
for his punchy low-budget films, Samuel Fuller hit a rough patch in the
mid-60’s and couldn’t get anything. Perhaps out of desperation, he swallowed
some misgivings and decided to work with some inexperienced producers on an
adventure film set in a Sudanese port city. The experience was a mess, but
Fuller escaped intact and cut the film to his general satisfaction; however,
the producers messed around with it, to the extent that he unsuccessfully tried
to get his name removed. Subsequently, despite being one of American cinema’s
great raconteurs, he could hardly bring himself to mention the picture. His
career never regained its earlier pace, but a decade later he managed to make
at least two other astounding pictures: The
Big Red One and White Dog.

Shark

When I watched the film again recently, it was as if the
elements were conspiring to prevent a viewer from gleaning any sense of what
Fuller might have had in mind. I watched it on DVD, but in a terrible print
with awful sound quality. It was released on the Troma label, which is usually
associated with consciously ridiculous exploitation movies, and although
Troma’s intentions seemed entirely respectable – the disc contains several
extras attempting to argue for the film’s merits – the fit seemed inherently
weird. It’s subsequently been released again in a Blu-ray version, so I’m sure
that would help in some respects, but with Fuller long gone and no apparent
hope of recreating his original cut, it’ll always be a bloodied carcass of a
film.

The film stars Burt Reynolds (at the very dawn of his film
career) as Caine, a gunrunner stranded with few resources, looking for a way
out. The only other Westerners around are a pathetic drunk of a doctor (Arthur
Kennedy) and a man and woman engaged in some mysterious underwater “research,”
looking for a new helper after the local boy they engaged was killed by a (of
course) shark. Reynolds takes the job and soon discovers there’s more to the
project than they’ve let on. The set-up also includes a conniving police chief
and a local kid who latches onto Reynolds: it’s the kind of sparse set-up
that’s powered hundreds of Hollywood movies, with vague echoes of Casablanca
and Howard Hawks and plenty of others. Caine is a relentlessly self-defined
protagonist, not without a moral code (he cares about the kid) but generally
happy to work every angle, because everyone else is doing the same. The primary
points of interest include some diverting local colour, good underwater
sequences and a moderately clever twist ending, but none of this is fundamental
to what one usually enjoys about Fuller’s cinema. The film, at least in this
version, doesn’t have much sign of the compelling characterizations, visual
force and clear attitude-striking that marks his best work.

House
of Bamboo

Still, I have a weakness for these bereft back alleys of
cinema, and allowed myself to imagine it might even be better viewed in this
sorrowful condition than in Fuller’s ideal version. The film in this form has
an end-of-the-world feeling to it, a stripping down to the edge of oblivion,
where everyone wants only to escape the present, whether by inviting death at
the bottom of the sea, or at the bottom of a bottle, or by repeated
recklessness that can’t beat the odds forever, with the decaying sound and
image and craft conspiring in the self-obliteration. The casting supports the
sense of a weird, bleak melting pot: Reynolds on the verge of stardom but with
a long decline to follow; Kennedy with five Oscar nominations behind him but
heading into twenty years of trashy pictures. The femme fatale is played by
Silvia Pinal, who a few years earlier had starred in some of Luis Bunuel’s best
films; it’s hard to look at her, in this displaced dubbed version, without
thinking of the surrealist master’s rebukes to society.

A few days later, feeling a desire for a more conventional
and canonical Fuller experience, I watched one of his most famous films, the
1954 House of Bamboo. It stars Robert
Stack as Eddie, an undercover army cop who infiltrates himself into an American
crime gang operating in Tokyo; Robert Ryan is Sandy, the man in charge. This
time, the quality was gorgeous, showcasing Fuller’s wonderfully precise
execution and the magnificent CinemaScope imagery. This is one of the Fuller
films where you can feel the man behind the camera, wholly engaged and on top
of his game, tolerating no slackness or wrong turns. Of course, it’s expressed
through the conventions of the day – Stack’s hard-boiled manner is rather
ridiculous by contemporary standards (which is probably why Ryan, working
through more subtle shadings, has had the more lasting reputation) and although
the film starts by emphasizing its use of real Japanese locations (and makes
remarkable use of those at several points, particularly in its high-concept
shoot-out finale), it’s still a highly stylized portrayal of the country and
society.

World
turning

But in Fuller’s peak period, this was one of the most
effective cinematic vocabularies ever devised. Sandy’s gang is made up entirely
of former GIs who went bad in one way or another during the war, now exiled in
the strangest of societies, where they hide in plain sight, each man with a
“kimono” to soothe his rough edges. The apparent exception is Sandy himself,
whose affinity for Eddie has a classic unexpressed homoerotic element (forming
a bridge to the anguished domestic melodramas of the time, some of which also
starred Stack). Eddie falls for the Japanese widow of a former gang member;
while investigating what happened to the dead man, he’s actually drawn largely
into retracing his footsteps, acting out a psychological exile that intersects
with the gang’s polished nihilism (they all wear nice suits and behave like
businessmen, but Sandy dictates that any man injured on the job must be shot
dead on the spot – the rule holds until he breaks it, to save Eddie).

The distance between the two films seems to evidence a
multi-faceted decline in confidence and certainty: not just that in Fuller’s
own circumstances, but in the industry surrounding him, and in the surrounding world
(which, via an amusement park exhibit, ominously circles at the end of House of Bamboo). The first film reflects
a post-WW2 clarity; beneath the cultural differences and psychological
shakiness, there’s still a relative morality that powers crisp narrative, and
lays a claim to razor-sharp imagery. A decade and a half later, the underlying
trauma and fractures have caused that surface to degrade, demanding a new
suitably conflicted breed of artist (as Fuller was eclipsed, Peckinpah rose).
Modern American cinema draws on both strands I suppose, while seldom addressing
how even the sharks are in danger now.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

We were in Israel recently, and we went to
the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, where the work continues to identify and
document each individual victim of the Holocaust. There’s such immense nobility
to that effort, in the insistence that each of those histories not only should
but will carry continuing weight,
that the imperative of not forgetting demands a scrupulous harvesting, no
matter how hard it may be, of each individual loss. And it suddenly seemed so
sad to me, without implying at all that the Shoah should be appropriated as a
metaphor, that there’s such a grim mismatching in the world; that the
scrupulous not forgetting of those fallen, and – as a wretched but instructive
contrast - the (if you ask me) deranged “over-remembering” of a select few
(Michael Jackson), doesn’t teach us anything about our broader responsibility.
During the Michael Jackson hoopla I had a moment of disconnection and went on
Google to look for how many people probably died of hunger that day. It was
something approaching 15,000. We lack the capacity to acknowledge them
individually, but what a global shame that we don’t even do so collectively, except in the most
sporadic and token of ways.

Fat and Sick

We don’t really respect those dying people.
We might say we do, but our actions make liars of us. If we respected them,
we’d never tolerate such a gulf of daily pain. I’m not even talking, today
anyway, about the difference in our wealth and comfort generally – let’s just
stipulate for this purpose that Western prosperity, if used correctly (smart
trade, smart aid, etc.) forms part of the best-hope scenario for addressing the
underdeveloped world’s pain. But I am
talking about food. About the fact that gluttony, indulgence, waste and
inefficiency are not just inherent in but actually necessary to our food system
as it’s constituted. That many of us gorge daily on volumes two, three times or
even more what we need, actually making ourselves fat and sick on it, which of
course just further depletes our ability and motivation to do anything more
than sit around and waddle back and forth from the nearest fast food depot.
Even if we think we enjoy it, what kind of pleasure rests in perpetuity on
something so repetitive, so artificial, so insidiously damaging? Oh I know, in
the same way we enjoy all the lame TV we’re so superior about and yet such
slaves to; the same cultural slop that fills up our brains and ensures our
disconnection from our enormous deterioration and self-cannibalization, so that
we keep consuming, keep the stale models going, although even in our blubbery
haze, we know everything just keeps getting worse.

Do I really mean “we”? Actually no – I’m
not particularly part of that mechanism. But I’m just a different kind of
failure then – judge for yourself whether better or worse. I avoid fast food
completely in its strip mall incarnation, and I’m good at eating fruit and
vegetables and controlling portion size and that kind of thing; I walk a lot
and I’m nowhere close to overweight. Good for me then. But all the worse for
me, because I’m not otherwise scrupulous about sourcing what I buy, I still
spend way too much money in other kinds of restaurants relative to my needs,
and I lack any kind of activism. But then, that’s the big black hole of our
age, how to effect change in a way that’s other than marginal, that isn’t
primarily about quieting your conscience (I know every journey begins with a
single step, but a bunch of disconnected single steps don’t amount to a
journey, and that’s all we seem capable of now).

Food Inc.

So often currently, we hear that we can’t
keep doing things the same way, that we have to change, become more
conscientious, over and over. Then the policy wheels turn exactly in the same
way, and anyone who seriously proposes even modestly suitable change is
(successfully) pilloried as rapacious, unpatriotic, socialistic, etc. So, for
example, eating better, and actual tangible steps to support that, couldn’t
possibly be successfully sold at present as a fundamental plank of social reform,
whereas a costly tax credit/spending spree to guard against some remote (but
media-friendly) neurotic risk certainly could be. Just as obsessing about a
dead pop star – the epitome of wasting time about nothing – gets positioned as
the most globally significant task available (and, in a feat of brilliant
disingenuousness, as something that somehow unites us in a common experience,
as if, you know, collectively destroying the planet wasn’t already enough
unity).

I didn’t go to see Robert Kenner’s documentary
Food Inc. for a few weeks, because I
expected it would just chime with my pre-existing views and make me mad, and so
it did. Drawn partly from the same well as Fast
Food Nation (author Eric Schlosser is one of the producers here), it moves
meticulously through all the key pieces of the chain, focusing in particular
how the fast food industry’s demands for predictable cost and quality spawned a
huge industrialization and consolidation of production, aided by ridiculous
government incentives and deregulation. The use of sample individuals to
illustrate a broader point is often problematic in general, but Kenner really
nails it here with one Latino family, endlessly filling up on dollar meals
because they can’t afford anything else (substantiated through a visit to the
local supermarket), with a family diabetes problem which eats up their money
for medication and thus increases their reliance on crap. The proliferation of
diabetes in younger people is one of the things I’d vaguely known about but not
focused on too much before seeing the film; again, it just leaves you empty and
miserable that it’s presumably impossible to have an appropriate policy debate
on this.

Utterly Lost

Although the movie should infuriate most
progressive-minded viewers (try reading Roger Ebert’s review), Kenner doesn’t
stoke the pot as much as he could, and his movie (at a tidy hour and a half or
so) might be one of the few that could actually have been longer. Among other
things, there’s very little material about foreign countries (beyond a brief
acknowledgement of how grotesque American crop subsidization murders the small
overseas producer), and although I’m not much of a Michael Moore admirer, I
wouldn’t have minded seeing some Moore-type guerilla tactics against the enabling
politicians. But of course, those kinds of caveats hardly matter here. The
movie ends with an Inconvenient Truth-type
rundown of small steps available to the viewer, but although I suppose the
climate change issue is objectively even more difficult, Kenner’s list actually
seemed to me more hopeless: the economic perversions he depicts will surely
only take on strength in a recession. And while I suppose we might be forgiven
for not initially being equal to ecosystem-wide issues, I don’t know what word or
phrase to use for our lost relationship with our own food, with what should be
the most basic element of living and self-respect. Pathetic? Degraded? Maybe
just utterly lost.

Friday, June 6, 2014

Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart opened in New York in
1985, and although I didn’t know exactly what it contains until I saw Ryan
Murphy’s new HBO film, it feels to me I’ve been aware of it almost as long as
I’ve had any adult cultural
awareness. I distinctly remember a period in the 1990’s when film magazines
like Variety, virtually on a weekly
basis, reported on Barbra Streisand’s progress toward filming the material, an
effort which eventually petered out. More recently, the play was revived on
Broadway, winning several Tony awards, and then Murphy finally managed to get
it on screen, albeit not on the big screen, but it hardly matters now. Kramer’s
late-in-life softening (he’s now 79, and has apparently had some serious health
close-calls) was reportedly a major factor in this – he’s expressed complete
satisfaction with the result.

The Normal Heart

Watching the HBO film, I couldn’t help wishing
we had Streisand’s version to compare it to – if only because of the passage of
time, the differences would surely be instructive and fascinating. The film
revolves around Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a protagonist with much of the back
story and many of the attributes of Kramer himself, active at the heart of the
gay community at the time when the “gay cancer” is initially identified. Weeks
is instrumental in organizing a response to the escalating crisis and in
lobbying for public funding and attention, but his aggressive methods cause
conflicts with his fellow activists. At the same time, he has the most
meaningful relationship of his life with a New
York Times journalist, who’s eventually infected with the disease.

It’s hard to watch the film without
thinking back to the recent documentary How
to Survive a Plague (I said the same thing when I was writing here about Dallas Buyers Club, so it’s clearly
entirely reshaped my sense of that piece of history), not just because Kramer
was one of the interviewees there. The focus is a little different though:
where How to Survive focuses on the
specific efforts toward finding a cure, The
Normal Heart is anchored a little further back in the assimilation process,
still overwhelmed by lack of comprehension that such a thing could be
happening, struggling toward meaningful personal or collective coping strategies,
with discussions of effective treatment anchored more in hope than in
articulated research. Still, that aside,, although I certainly don’t hold any
views on the inherent superiority of documentary films over the other kinds, in
this case the comparison doesn’t particularly work to the benefit of Murphy’s
film.

Opened out

I say this for mostly unsurprising
reasons. The play has been “opened out” in the usual ways, adding exteriors,
additional secondary characters, and so on, but the ways in which it adheres to
the source material, including its focus on a small group of core people, still
seem limiting; it contains numerous extended monologues that impede the sense
of naturalism; the character of a wheelchair-bound doctor who’s one of the
first to recognize what’s happening (played here, rather monotonously, by Julia
Roberts) may have been an effective counterpoint on stage but seems like a
leaden device here. Although the film is more physically frank than a 1990’s
Streisand version would likely have been, and articulated without the Hollywood
gloss one imagines she would have painted on it, its overriding purpose is no
different - simply to record Kramer’s landmark work for posterity, even if
every passing year can only possibly add distance, reducing the odds that the
underlying anger can be transmitted intact.

Somewhat offsetting that though,
Murphy’s film is a fascinating encapsulation of America’s changing conversation
about being gay. The opening stretch of the film emphasizes how the community
at that time, in Weeks’ assessment, is overly dependent on promiscuity and
demonstrative exuberance to define itself; when the Roberts character counsels
taking a break from sex until they know more about the disease, many see that
merely as a route back into the closet. At the same time though, the gay
community can barely interact openly with the big world around it, and
political leaders still perceive no moral need to extend even trivial mercies
toward homosexuals, let alone any practical advantage; if the political leaders
themselves are closeted, one perceives, they’re only less likely to do anything
that might undermine their own security.

Conquered
territory

Looking back, it wouldn’t have been so
surprising if the reaction to AIDS had broken in such a way – as many doubtless
feared at the time that it would – as to fortify the disinterest or disgust of
the rest of the world, and leave gay people in the ghetto forever. Instead,
it’s possible to see its devastation as the start of the slow (but in recent
years rapidly escalating) climb toward equality. The most thrilling parts of The Normal Heart now – and it has quite
a lot of them – are the heated debates about fundamental identity and status;
for example, Weeks’ insistence to his (straight) brother, the most important
figure in his life, that he nevertheless won’t speak to him until he accepts Ned’s
sexuality as being fully equal to his own, something the brother finds
impossible. If the brother thereby seems like a symbol of expired attitudes, we
should recall that it’s only been two
years since President Obama was willing to support same-sex marriage, thus
ending his own support of a fundamental institutionalized prejudice. Murphy’s
film arrives at a time of astonishing realization of dreams: by no means fully
achieved of course – maybe that’ll come when it ceases to be news that yet
another second-level celebrity isn’t actually straight, or when a trashy
website like TMZ can no longer get mileage out of pouncing on the homophobic
slurs of the rich and unimportant (the ongoing interest in which seems to speak
to a profound lingering insecurity, among other things).

In this light, one of the film’s most
meaningful elements is the presence of Jim Parsons, playing the executive
director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (a part he also played in the Broadway
revival). Parsons seemingly slid easily into public acceptance as an openly gay
man playing a nominally straight role; in The
Normal Heart, he retains his familiar speech patterns and mannerisms, but
as an increasingly exhausted mechanism of resistance. It’s not just that he
gives the film’s most moving performance (from a strong line-up) but that by
his very presence he embodies the ultimate triumph over potential decimation,
and clarifies the film as a declaration of victory. Barbra Streisand’s mid-90’s
version of the material would no doubt have tried to find some legitimate
signals of long-term hope too, but it would surely have struggled to make them
more than far-off aspirations.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Critics have had a field day with Jon
Avnet’s 88 Minutes, which racked up a
startling 11% approval rating on the bellwether Rotten Tomatoes site. You know,
I don’t like to run with the crowd, but the film is really not very good. I
wouldn’t have gone to it at all if not for Al Pacino - readers may be aware
that I remain a true believer in the man and his magic. I don’t even mind that
he makes easier choices now – it’s good to watch him seemingly comfortable in
his own skin after those more preoccupied early decades.

88 Minutes

I’m being more generous than most critics
even in positing that the movie could
have avoided completely sucking. The premise (an outlandish one, but aren’t
they all?) has Pacino’s forensic psychiatrist Jack Gramm being informed via a
call on his cell phone that he has only 88 minutes to live. It seems to have
something to do with a serial killer who was locked away nine years earlier,
largely on the strength of Gramm’s testimony, and is scheduled for the electric
chair that very day. Meanwhile, more killings are happening, using the killer’s
distinctive M.O., and the evidence points to Gramm. Well, Gramm, as you would,
assumes that 88 minutes should be enough to figure all of that out, and so he
does.

The real villain of the piece is director
Avnet, whose work here is seriously heavy-handed. One’s heart sinks right from
the clumsy depiction of the murder that starts the film, and takes further
blows as one poorly staged, indifferently acted scene follows another. The
basic premise could have worked without the 88 minute gimmick, but since the
gimmick is there, it’s pathetic how little rigour the film brings to it –
virtually at every juncture, events take place that couldn’t possibly have
taken the five minutes, or whatever, the movie claims. I sometimes find myself
thinking this is a kind of well-meaning naiveté, that directors like Avnet are
so engaged by the basic magic of the medium that the raw elements they work
with start seeming infinitely pliable. But no, the weight of evidence points to
pervasive disregard. Another example would be the threadbare nature of the
disguise wrapped around the Vancouver locations, standing in here for Seattle.
Basically it’s an old man’s film – the prominent presence of several attractive
young women (a number of them bearing crushes on Gramm) just underlines that.

I’ll never grudge Pacino a few mistakes,
but it’s unclear whether he learned from it, because he’s already made another
film with the same director, re-teaming with Robert De Niro. A decade ago, in
the wake of Heat, that would have
still have been an event, now it’s barely a footnote (the trailer, available
online, looks pretty dull – actually all I recall about it is how old and big
De Niro looks). Even as I write this review, I wonder if I should just delete
it and forget about 88 Minutes. With
the even more thoroughly derided Gigli,
a few years ago, I could think of a few plausible (to me at least) against the
tide observations. Now I stare at the walls and wait for insight. None comes.
88 minutes pass. I still live.

Pacino on Letterman

At that point I leave this article aside
for a day, and in the interim I watch Pacino’s appearance on Letterman. He’s 68
now, and I can’t exactly say he doesn’t look it, or maybe it’s more some
parallel universe notion of 68. He doesn’t really seem to be concentrating. He
brushes off Letterman’s questions about movies, preferring to talk about
theater (his first anecdote is the same one he used on his last appearance). I
thought it was mesmerizing, but I can’t help wondering what the average, say,
25-year-old would make of it. I still think of Letterman himself (another idol
of mine) as young and at the centre of things, I really do, even though he just
turned 61, and sometimes sounds like it.

88
Minutes barely gets a mention. I wonder if anyone
cares. When I saw the movie, there was one other guy in the theater – based on
the box office, it must have been the same story just about everywhere. I start
to develop a perverse compulsion now to keep writing about it, because who else
will? And you know, my relationship to movies has changed too. I used to think
maybe this column would be a springboard, that I’d try to latch onto a bigger
publication, or maybe expand onto the web. But now I think that would be
unsatisfying, and just not very useful. The volume of online movie writing,
even good stuff, grows exponentially. Every day I stumble across another blog.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about established American critics getting
laid off, bought out, and so forth – not too many of those stable pulpits left
any more. Makes sense to me – who needs them? Why should anyone, seriously, be
able to pay their mortgage by churning out 800 damning words on 88 Minutes, and let’s say two or three
others a week. That’s not serious work. It’s a sideline.

So this is the limit of my ambition in that
area. I hope to stay in this space for as long as the Outreach will have me, and after that I’ll be finished with movie
writing. I don’t know if I’m talking about a month, or twenty years. I hope
it’s a long time, but it’s like anything else, I’ll only become more set in my
ways. Like, you know, every other Letterman show features a Regis Philbin joke.
Even giving the time of day to an old man’s film like 88 Minutes, for any purpose other than to mock it, will be an act
of creaky rebellion.

London to Brighton

But another thing you may not know about
Letterman – the show regularly ends with terrific music. Hot bands, new
discoveries – nothing complacent going on there. I feel it helps keep my own
musical taste young (last thing I bought was the Black Keys, if that means
anything to you). So let’s turn this thing round. Hear about London to Brighton? It’s a micro-budget,
hard as nails British thriller, made by 35-year old Paul Anthony Williams. The
movie is extremely scrupulous, without a hint of unearned glamour or polish.
It’s also very hard to watch, functioning at times almost as a documentary on
the reality of whoring, including the 12-year-old girl variety. It does have a
gangster character who may owe a bit too much to movie conventions (or maybe
not, I wouldn’t know), but it’s not at all complacent about the reality of
guns, pain, and making money (or the fraught meaning of time). The movie’s
implied economic analysis is devastating, its “happy” ending highly
conditional. The only conventionally beautiful scene in there, a shot of a
cottage in Devon, might as well be set in Oz. You think No Country for Old Men had anything profound to say about evil and
morality? No country for old men? – really? Who has the money, the power, the
talk shows? OK, usually not the best movies. But is that the game decider?

In Jonathan Glazer’s riveting Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson plays
– no, that’s not quite the right word – is
an alien in human form, driving around Glasgow in a van and picking up guys,
taking them to her place for sex but instead sending them to a strange
other-dimensional fate (in the book on which the film is based, it’s apparently
explicit that they’re sent to be consumed on her home planet, but the film
doesn’t spell it out). She’s aided by a man on a motorcycle, who monitors her
activity and sometimes steps in to help with clean up. All seems to proceed
smoothly until she picks up a man with neurofibromatosis – the “elephant man
disease” – who, whether because of unsuitability or a faltering on her part, is
able to escape; after that, her focus is lost, and she wanders, tentatively testing
the extent to which she can live as a human.

Under the Skin

Glazer clearly sets out with the film
to create a modern myth, to add to the privileged catalogue of such works. The
opening shots of the film evoke the cosmic abstraction of something like 2001; the man on the motorcycle and the
victims’ descent into viscous oblivion links to Jean Cocteau; the alien’s real
form and some aspects of her quest echo The
Man who Fell to Earth; the notion of a woman transformed through sex into
something destructive goes back to Cat
People, and I’m sure the list of resonances could go on almost
indefinitely. The film teems with bleakly stunning images, often showcasing the
forbidding grandeur of the Scottish landscapes, against which thoughts of
relative human powerlessness are standard existential fare. The music score
sounds conceived and performed by an ensemble on the verge of cracking its head
open. At some points, in particular in an extended scene involving the fate of
a couple and their young child on a beach, Glazer seems to be testing how much
cruelty we can stand to absorb.

I usually avoid spending extended
portions of these reviews discussing the qualities or otherwise of its actors,
but it’s impossible in this case not to reflect at some length on Scarlett
Johansson. This isn’t just a case of casting an actor in a role – the film’s
impact depends to a massive extent on having someone like Scarlett Johansson
(having seen the film, it feels like it could only ever have been specifically her) at its centre. Many of
the people in the film aren’t actors – Johansson actually drove around Glasgow
and instigated the encounters, monitored by hidden cameras, with the film crew
eventually emerging to make things clear and take care of paperwork. This sets
up a complex spin on our customary engagement with glamorously famous Hollywood
stars. On the one hand, it extends the usual pleasure of watching and implied
desire to a near-ultimate place – she’s never made a film which is so much
about looking at her, without the benefit of studio lighting, often semi- or
completely naked. And at the same time, she’s audaciously, rampantly available;
we’re watching men, however briefly, sensing the possibility of one of those
stories you tell forever. And then it kills them, although in a way strangely
evocative of what they came for, extending into infinity the disembodied
emptiness of orgasm.

Scarlett Johansson

One could theoretically imagine the film
with one of those countless California women who embody conventional
aerobicized concepts of sexiness, looking potentially (and perhaps in some
respects literally) constructed on a surgeon’s table. But Johansson doesn’t
look like that at all – she’s much more traditionally voluptuous, with the kind
of old-school physicality that might look sexier in a low-cut dress than out of
it, and causing you to think about her body in a very direct, visceral way. I
don’t mean that to sound prurient – the director and the actress clearly knew
what they were up to here. Overall, Under
the Skin is the first film in years that seems to warrant a place in the
pantheon that indelibly fuse our sense of actress and character, creating
something endlessly enveloping and transcendent: Marlene Dietrich’s pictures
with Josef von Sternberg, Kim Novak in Vertigo,
some of Catherine Deneuve’s early films, and so on (although not so on for very
long – it’s not a real long list).

It’s probably clear from all this that Under the Skin is one of the emblematic
films that’s “not for everyone.” Jeffrey Wells of the Hollywood Elsewhere website, for instance, said this: “I sat there and sat there,
waiting for ‘it’ to happen, for any notion of what this film might be saying or
even hinting at, for anything at all to come together in my head…and nothing
happened. My eyes glazed over. My spirit sank into the swamp. Trust me, Under the Skin is pretty
close to torture. Torture after dropping two Percocets. Profoundly alienating —
dull, meandering, murkily photographed, incoherent, nothing.”

Aliens
in disguise

Admittedly, even if you don’t share that assessment, it
might be a little hard to articulate the film’s strengths. Stephen Holden ended
his New York Times review by saying
it “leaves us reflecting on the possibility that every being in the universe is
an alien in disguise,” but I’m not sure how one could meaningfully “reflect” on
such a pointless thing (at least, not without succumbing to paranoid delusions).
It seems more relevant to me that in modern-day Scotland, the one thing you can
be sure of is that things are no more special than they seem. The film
sometimes feels like a documentary, watching people in shopping malls or on the
street; at one point, it gives us a fairly extended look at one man’s life –
his meagre purchases at the grocery store, later eating his dinner in front of
the TV while watching a recording of long-dead British comedian Tommy Cooper.
Fantasy films usually avoid dating themselves too specifically, but at one
point here, a radio broadcast refers to the pending referendum on independence.
It’s clearly Scotland in the here and now, crawling ahead with its daily
struggles and small pleasures, which may or may not be aligned with some
broader national direction.

Only in one way that we know of could the concept of “aliens
in disguise” be relevant to this time and place, and that’s through the
intervention of cinema: what’s more alien to normal life than Hollywood and all
that it represents, and what wears more of a disguise, insisting on the
necessity of its products to our lives while offering only bland forms of
death? At the same time as Under the Skin
was in theatres, after all, one could still catch Johansson as “Black Widow” in
Captain America: the Winter Soldier. Such
creations exist impossibly far from life; it’s remarkable that, however
briefly, Under the Skin reached out
and bridged the divide.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).